A TWISTED bodybuilder who drove a girlfriend to suicide used her death to try to dodge a lifelong sentence yesterday.

Thomas O’Leary was due to be sentenced for a series of brutal attacks on two lovers and had been warned he faced a lifelong restriction order.

But his lawyer, George Gebbie, tried to get him a shorter jail term by claiming his human rights had been breached over a Daily Record story about his cruelty to another young woman.

And after Gebbie made his argument, the judge in the case withdrew and sentencing was delayed.

The Record told last June how Emma Browne, 22, took her own life after O’Leary, 32, hounded her mercilessly from behind bars for 10 months.

And Gebbie learned that the sentencing judge, Lord Uist, had sent a copy of our report to a psychologist carrying out a pre-sentence investigation into the danger O’Leary might pose to the public.

The judge thought the article was so important to explaining O’Leary’s background that he passed it to the Crown and to O’Leary’s legal team.

O’Leary was never convicted of abusing Emma, but her mum Rosemary and brother Mark are adamant he was to blame for her death.

At the High Court in Edinburgh, Gebbie conceded that the law on lifelong restriction orders lets judges take allegations into account which have not been proved in court.

But he claimed Lord Uist’s decision to pass on our story was against human rights law, which says people should be presumed innocent.

Gebbie also claimed that because Lord Uist had sent our article to the psychologist, he should not rule on the human rights issue. He said: “In all the circumstances, I am obliged to ask my lord to recuse himself.”

Lord Uist left the bench to consider his position and returned some time later to agree that it was “not appropriate” for him to make the ruling.

Another judge will now deal with the question on Monday. O’Leary will be sentenced later and remains in custody.

He was convicted in May last year of attacks including half strangling them, threats with a knife, punching and kicking and thrashings with a belt. His brutality was fuelled by alcohol and steroids.

O’Leary was tried in the sheriff court but sent to the High Court for sentence because the five-year maximum a sheriff can impose was not long enough.

The thug has previous convictions for serious violence, including attacks on women. Lord Uist warned him at a previous hearing that he was considering a lifelong sentence and said: “I cannot begin to understand why this case was prosecuted in a sheriff court.”

He called for an in-depth risk assessment which could allow him to impose a lifelong restriction order.

Control freak O’Leary was in jail when he began threatening Emma. Her family say she was afraid to leave home without his permission and he threatened to put a petrol bomb through her door.

Emma was was found dead in her flat in Rutherglen, near Glasgow, on August 16, 2009. She had hanged herself.

Her family say they found phone messages and letters which proved O’Leary’s abuse drove her to suicide.

Shortly before she died, Emma wrote a heart-rending letter to O’Leary, which is reproduced above. She told him: “This is probably the last letter I will ever bother sending you.

“You have isolated me, degraded me, threatened me, demanded trivial things from me, demonstrated large amounts of power and control over me, and generally abused me.

“You may think I’m stupid etc, and you call me ‘thick as s**t’.

“In actual fact I am not, I am very intelligent. You just don’t see that side of me any more as you’ve trashed me so much.

“I have no self-esteem and no confidence.

“I am appalled at your behaviour but I have always been too scared to say anything to you or defend myself.

“I’m horrified at myself for letting this go on for nine months. The way you talk to me and treat me most of the time, you wouldn’t expect your worst enemy to put up with.”